Just Finished Viewing… Rogers The Musical!

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Some time ago, I watched the six part Disney Plus series Hawkeye, about one of Marvel’s Avengers, Clint Barton. As superheroes go, he had no special powers, he was just very, very good with a bow, though he did have trick arrows. He had lost his wife and children during the “Blip” in which half of the life in the universe vanished, and, in his grief and anger, became a vigilante. Now, post the Blip, when everyone returned, he has taken his children to New York for a pre Christmas treat, including a Broadway show, Rogers: The Musical, about Captain America who is, of course, a real person in that universe. Apparently the song was inspired by real world musical Hamilton. It was composed by Marc Sharman and Scott Wittman.

Clint can’t cope with it, during a bouncy number,  “Save The City” remembering his dearest friend, Natasha Romanoff(Black Widow), who had died in front of him, sacrificing herself to save the world; he leaves the theatre before the song is over. At the end of the series there was a full version of “Save The City” in the mid-credits. 

It was such a delightful performance, I thought that if it had been a real show I’d be booking tickets already.

This year, there was, indeed, a short version of Rogers: The Musical, including “Save The City” and five new songs, performed at Disney California Adventure. I was a bit disappointed that, at 37 minutes, it was never going to be touring the world and arriving in Australia. 

However, I stumbled across the show on YouTube and happily watched it. It’s a very condensed version of Captain America: The First Avenger, with music. I have just watched it for the second time tonight and enjoyed it all over again. 

It will probably mean more if you have seen the original film, but the songs are a delight and maybe it will make you curious to see the film.

Here is a link for you.

 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6d3k_ulXcMY&pp=ygUScm9nZXJzIHRoZSBtdXNpY2Fs

 

Just Finished Reading… Of Blood Descended By Steven Veerapen. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2022

 

The year: 1522. The place: England. Henry VIII is welcoming his nephew, Emperor Charles V, to his court. As part of the welcome, a special masque is being prepared, organised by Cardinal Wolsey. It’s on an Arthurian theme because Henry is obsessed with his supposed descent from King Arthur. 

But there is a murder; the royal historian, Pietro Gonzaga, who has been working on proving Henry’s Arthurian descent, is found dead on the lawns of Hampton Court. And there will be more murders in the course of the novel.

The sleuth here is Anthony Blanke, a music teacher who was once one of Wolsey’s trumpeters. He is the son of late royal trumpeter John Blanke, an African musician who arrived in England with Catherine of Aragon. Anthony is at Wolsey’s palace of Hampton Court when the first murder happens, having been sent for to play a role in the masque.

After several murders and having been assaulted himself, Anthony finds the killer…

John Blanke was a real person, whose image is shown in a couple of paintings, sitting on a horse and blowing a fanfare, but there is little known of him after he retired from the job and married, so why not give him a son?

The guy with the turban was probably John Blanke. Public domain

It’s an intriguing story. There is a lot of detail about the work that needed to be done to prepare for a masque. Wolsey, in this novel, is at his height of power, several years before his downfall. Anne Boleyn is there, taking part in the masque, but not yet being courted by Henry.  

Steven Veerapen has written some historical non fiction, but there are two novels in this series so far, as well as the Ned Savage Elizabethan thrillers. I am definitely planning to read the sequel to this novel, Of Judgement Fallen!

Available in both ebook and print.

Happy Star Trek Day!

 Today is the birthday of Elizabeth I. I suppose I could write a massive post about Elizabeth I in fiction, but I’m too tired to think about it right now, so maybe another time.

Today is another anniversary: the first showing of Star Trek. Not Star Trek: TOS, or even Classic Trek as it was called for a while, but Star Trek. Who would have thought, way back then, that this  series which was cancelled after only three seasons, would become so huge? I confess to having lost track of it. There are entire Trek spin-offs that I haven’t ever seen and probably never will. Others, such as Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks I have seen large chunks of and enjoyed, but just had no time to catch up with.

But I fell in love with it as a teenager. My first episode was “Mudd’s Women” in which the con artist Harry Mudd is taking three women to get husbands. (One of the three was in an episode of Get Smart!) I quickly grew addicted to it. My favourite character was, of course, Mr Spock. My first piece of fan fiction, written for English(the teacher gave us the task of writing a fan fic)was about how Kirk overturns the umpteenth matriarchy and is not appreciated by anyone. 

I wrote quite a few fan fics over the years until I started to be paid for my writing. I know a lot of pro writers still do fan fiction under pen names, but I just couldn’t do both. 

For those of you who don’t know the details, Gene Roddenberry created the series and pitched it as “Wagon Train To The Stars.” The original pilot, “The Cage” didn’t sell, though bits of it were later used in an episode called “The menagerie”, and he was told to get rid of the female second in command and the Vulcan. He got rid of Number One, the female second in command, for the second pilot, but the actress came back as Nurse Chapel and the Enterprise computer voice and did a lot of episodes of STNG and Deep Space Nine as Lwxana Troi, the likeable, cheeky and strong mother of Deanna Troi, ship’s Counsellor. And Number One turned up again in Strange New Worlds, aboard Captain Christopher Pike’s Enterprise. Times have changed, for the better, since the 1960s Enterprise set off on its five year mission. 

Despite all that and although I adore the spin-offs I’ve seen, and the films, the 1960s show has always been my Trek, the Star Trek of my heart. When the first film came out, my friends and I decided to dress beautifully for an opening night, not in costume. That may have been the last time there were no costumed fans in the audience, but it was a very special night for us. 

I have been enjoying the bits I have seen of the spin-offs recently, though, “Strange New Worlds” especially. We see a young Nyota Uhura, a cadet learning the ropes, absolutely not saying “Hailing frequencies open”. She speaks thirty-seven languages, among other things. We see a young Spock, played by the grandson of Gregory Peck, who has some of his grandfather’s mannerisms, but he is Spock. He has managed to get Leonard Nimoy’s voice right. He and T’Pring, the woman we saw rejecting him for another man in the original series, are lovers. Dr M’Benga, who appeared in two episodes of the original series, has a back story and replaces Dr Boyce, the comfortable middle aged ship’s doctor of “The Cage”. 

Picard is another show I liked, and was originally written by Michael Chabon, author of a novel I loved, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Klay. It had Romulan ninja nuns who had raised a young boy and taught him as much as a man was allowed to learn. 

Lower Decks is animated and very funny. It’s set aboard a ship that isn’t the top ship in the fleet. The adventures are seen from the viewpoint of a group of Ensigns, not the Captain(one of the Ensigns is her daughter, though, and drives her crazy!)

I thoroughly enjoyed the three films in the Kelvin timeline, about the early years of the original series crew. The role of McCoy was played by Kiwi actor Karl Urban, whom I last saw as Eomer in Lord Of The Rings. He got DeForrest Kelly, the original McCoy,  absolutely spot-on. Even the voice was convincing. Zoe Saldana, whom I later saw in the Marvel films as Gamora, adopted daughter of the villain, Thanos, was Uhura and her relationship with Spock was made canon. Well, in the Kelvin timeline, anyway. Zachary Quinto, the villain of Heroes, was a very good Spock. 

Chris Hemsworth, whom you probably know best as Thor, appeared briefly as Kirk’s father, killed about ten minutes into the film…

Kirk, p.aged by Christopher Pine, grew as a character through the three films, and became the Kirk we know and love from the original series. 

Just finishing this with a personal thing involving Mr Pine.

This evening, on X, formerly Twitter, I got a follow from someone who called himself Chris Pine, actor, with a Hollywood address and tweets with photos. Okay, seems to be the real thing, I thought, though puzzled by his small number of followers. I followed back anyway, then got a DM. It was polite enough, but I have had a LOT of DMs immediately after a follow back, and I replied asking him what I ask them, not to DM unless there is something he needs to discuss in private. 

Well! Turns out it was him, wanting to have a personal account because his publicity team does the official stuff on his behalf. This was his first go at it - he only joined last year. He was terribly offended! I apologised, explained and we had a brief chat before I said good night. 

So, I got a follow from “ Captain Kirk”!  Who would think it? 

Just Finished Reading… The Left-Handed Booksellers Of London: Melbourne, Allen And Unwin, 2022

I have had this in ebook for some time, but forgot to read it. Then I did, because I absentmindedly bought a print copy of the sequel. And having read it, I’m kicking myself for leaving it this long.

The setting: England in 1983(the year Garth Nix first visited England).  But not quite our 1983. In the TV series The Professionals, Bodie and Doyle, are female, for starters, something the female fans of my acquaintance would hate - they love to drool over the male characters! 

More important, the booksellers of the title are an extended family of magic users, who actually do sell books because, as one of them says early in the novel when asked, they do have to make a living. But their two bookshops are used in their magic practice. They seem to be long-lived too, as one of the matriarchs of the family complains that another stole her “young man” a couple of centuries ago. They have arrangements with the London police, who don’t particularly like them, but accept that what they’re doing is necessary.

Eighteen year old Susan Arkshaw has been living with her mother outside of Bath. She doesn’t know who her father was, though she has a couple of items belonging to him, and her mother can’t or won’t tell her. 

But when she goes to  London to study art, she soon finds out that she is important to someone nasty, and the baddies are after her. Fortunately for her, she is helped by left-handed bookseller Merlin and his sister Vivien, a right hander. Left and right handedness isn’t regular handedness as we know it - it’s more a job description; the magical hand is silver and the left-handers do one thing, the right another.

While Susan’s father’s cigarette case and library card are being researched and tested by booksellers, she and her new friends have a number of adventures including kidnapping by beings from the Old World of which her father was a part. There is a probability that one of the booksellers is a traitor…

The novel is great fun. The characters are likeable. Merlin, who starts the novel by rescuing Susan from a criminal working for the Old World villains, enjoys shape shifting to female form and wearing nice clothes in either gender. He and Vivien are both working to protect Susan, sometimes from their own family, who have a tendency to kill off children of Old World beings in case these children might be inconvenient.  

Susan doesn’t need much rescuing, except from situations she has no way of knowing about. Sometimes she manages to rescue herself from those situations anyway. By the end of the novel she is beginning to be confident in her new magical powers.

The style of this book reminds me somewhat of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London series, so if you enjoy those novels you should enjoy this.

Available at all good bookshops and websites.

 

 

Honey And The Valley Of Horses by Wendy Orr. Melbourne: Allen And Unwin, 2023

 Honey and her family pack up their converted ice cream van with food and clothes, and head off for an adventure during a bad time(I suspect it’s during the pandemic, though COVID isn’t mentioned). They find themselves in a valley occupied by a herd of sentient magical horses. They know an ancestor was there and returned after seven years, but can’t find a way out; the trail to and from the river and a bridge which they crossed to get in have both vanished. 

Now seven years have passed. The family have managed well, and the two children, Honey and her little brother Rumi, have grown. The family have been adopted by individual horses in the herd. But Papa is very sick and needs help from outside the valley…

This is a gentle story about family - and the family includes the horses, which protect Honey, her parents and grandmother and her little brother. The humans ride only when the horses invite them. The family has learned not only to grow food from seeds of the fruit and vegetables they brought with them and renew clothes, they have created their own culture of story telling around the fire at night. The ice cream van has become their home.  

The magical paradise in which they live is Australian, with native Australian animals and plants, except for the horses, which are descended from a horse brought by the ancestor and a mysterious mare who was there when they arrived. 

The story was inspired by her parents, who loved camping and preparing for long journeys and converted a boat into a home in their eighties, and by wondering how children raised in the pandemic would cope with going back into the world. That was inspired by her own family’s experiences during the pandemic.

It’s a good read for middle school children like the horse-loving girl I was at that age, and definitely recommended! 

Thank you to Allen And Unwin for this copy.

Available on Australian web sites, including ebooks. The book should be available outside of Australia soon, so keep an eye out! While you wait, check out Wendy Orr’s other books, which are right there on Amazon. The award winning Ancient Greek trilogy is very special.

Crows Nest by Nikki Mottram. St Lucia, Queensland, University of Queensland Press, 2023

 Child protection worker Dana Gibson has had marriage issues after the loss of her own child, and leaves Sydney for a job in Queensland regional town Toowoomba. She visits nearby Crows Nest to assess the children of Sandra Kirby. Soon after, Sandra and her friend Debbie are shot dead in Sandra’s car late at night. Potential killers all seem to have alibis. The police declare it a murder suicide and close the case, but to Dana it doesn’t make sense. She continues to investigate, despite getting into trouble at work over it.There are people who would rather she didn’t…

The novel is set in 1996, mentioning the Port Arthur massacre in the first chapter. 

I enjoyed this novel very much. Dana is someone you can cheer for, though she has many woes. This is the first of a series, so hopefully she will have developed past her troubles by the next novel. There is also a delightful child, Angus, who looks set to be her assistant sleuth in future books; he does pretty well in this one, coming up with ideas Dana hasn’t thought of.

I’m looking forward to future books in this series. It’s a fine debut novel for the author, who is herself a child protection worker. 

Thanks to the publisher University of Queensland Press and Victorian Sisters In Crime for sending me this! 

It’s now available from all good bookshops and websites. 

Books And Films Featuring Shakespeare As A Character!

 I’ve been rewatching the wonderful Upstart Crow by Ben Elton. It’s a sitcom about Shakespeare. That made me think of all the Shakespeare-related work I have come across over the years - books, films, plays and more. So, let me have a waffle!

One play, by Aussie playwright David Williamson, is Dead White Males, set in academia, in which Shakespeare pops up several  times. In the very first scene, a University academic shoots him down. He does, however, turn up again and there are scenes taken from his plays, which the play’s main characters perform. I know it sounds over the top, but it was very funny and entertaining. 

Shakespeare appears briefly in the Blackadder New Year’s Eve special. A time travelling Blackadder punches him in defence of all the schoolkids who will suffer through his plays. When he returns to the present, Shakespeare is known as the guy who invented the ballpoint pen.

Upstart Crow was written to commemorate the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Each episode is centred around one of his plays. It’s especially funny because Ben Elton has a poke at such things as “words created by Shakespeare”; this Shakespeare claims a whole lot of words and sayings he never did create, despite being told he didn’t. Elton also has fun with the entire “Shakespeare didn’t write his plays” thing. In fact, not only does Elton’s Shakespeare write all his plays, he also writes Marlowe’s plays! Kit Marlowe doesn’t write anything, but he does like to be known as a playwright and is always nagging Shakespeare to let him have plays to claim. Sometimes he succeeds…

My favourite book with Shakespeare in it is Harry Turtledove’s alternative universe novel Ruled Britannia, in which the Spanish Armada succeeded in conquering England. It’s seen from two viewpoints, Shakespeare and Lope Da Vega, a real Spanish playwright who actually wrote a lot more than Shakespeare - and was in the Spanish Armada, but never got as far as England in our world. Lope Da Vega is a lieutenant in the Spanish forces but still writing his plays for the entertainment of the Spanish occupiers, but he speaks English, so loves going to the theatre and is a huge fan of Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been commissioned to write a play about King Phillip - and another one he has to keep secret, because it’s to be used after Phillip’s death to inspire rebellion. 

If you get curious about Lope Da Vega, a few of his plays have been translated into English; I found a couple in Apple Books.

Of course, you have probably seen Shakespeare In Love, or at least heard of it. It’s a gentle comedy which starts with Shakespeare having writer’s block while trying to write his play Romeo And Ethel The Pirate’s Daughter. He is inspired by a young woman called Viola, and the film ends with a shipwreck like the one in Twelfth Night.

More recently, there was All Is True, with some big names - Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench as Shakespeare’s wife Anne and Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton. Shakespeare’s theatre has burned down. He has returned to Stratford and his family, vowing never to write again. But the family has its own issues, given how little time he has spent at home over the years. In fact, there is an in joke about that second best bed he left Anne in his will. When he comes home, she makes him sleep in the guest bed(the best), suited to a guest. Later, when that problem is solved, he leaves her the second best bed as their own personal in joke.

Both his daughters have problems of their own and there is still a secret about his son’s death. However, by the end, the worst is over and his wife is learning to read.

It’s a lovely film, well worth a watch.

Shakespeare appears in some children’s books too. Susan Cooper, author of the magnificent Dark Is Rising series, also wrote a lovely novel called King Of Shadows. In it, a teenage American boy in England for a boys’ acting tour in which he is playing Puck, finds himself in Elizabeth’s England, playing Puck to Shakespeare’s Oberon. Shakespeare has lost his son, Hamnet, and Nat, the hero, is an orphan, so they have a father-son relationship. Susan Cooper had a good reason for making her hero American; he comes from North Carolina, where there is a place where people still speak with accents from Elizabethan England. 

Cue For Treason by Geoffrey Trease, features a girl disguised as a boy working as a boy actor in Shakespeare’s company. He figures her out pretty quickly, but doesn’t give her away. It’s well and truly out of print, alas, like most of Geoffrey Trease’s books, but you can get it in audiobook, read by the wonderful Clive Mantle, who played Little John in Robin Of Sherwood. 

Can you think of another book or film with Shakespeare in it? 

A Message Through Time by Anna Ciddor. Melbourne: Allen And Unwin, 2023

 

Australian boy Felix and his older stepsister Zoe have been on holiday in France, in the city of Arles. In the last hour or so before departure, Felix finds a Roman stylus, with a message in a bottle giving instructions for time travel, writing the Latin word “Ave” to travel into the past and “Vale” to return. Of course, he can’t resist and they find themselves in Roman Arles, or Arelate, in the time of Emperor Constantine. There they accidentally pick up a Roman girl, Petronia, whom they show around briefly before taking her back to her own time, where they may be stuck…

If you have read the novel The Boy Who Stepped Through Time by the same author this will be familiar, but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this, though there is a guest appearance by a character from that novel. 

The novel is a lot of fun, with culture clash mixed into the adventure. Petronia’s attitude to modern times is hilarious(though she is impressed by public playgrounds). When the three young people return to Roman times the culture clash is even more over-the-top, with food, medicine and customs bizarre to the two modern children, but quite normal to their hostess. Like the previous novel, it is well researched with the help of the author’s sister, an expert in this era. The author has also done the very good internal artwork. 

They take a trip on a barge along the river Rhone to reach Petronia’s family, and from here things start going wrong for  Felix, but he can’t tell Zoe.

The adventure does bring them closer, though.

I enjoy time-slip stories and this one is an excellent example of its type. 

Perry, hero of The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, has to live in this era by himself and work out how to get home while Felix and Zoe have each other and know what to do - the problem is a very different one. 

But anyone who enjoyed the first novel in this universe will certainly enjoy this one. 

I recommend it for ages 9-12, late primary school to early secondary. 

Available in both ebook and print, along with the rest of her fiction, at all good web sites in Australia, or order from your local bookshop. If you live outside Australia you might have to find out when it’s available in your country. Right now, it’s only available here, sorry!  But you can get her other books, including The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, on overseas sites, including Amazon, both print and Kindle.

Thank you, Allen and Unwin, for sending me a copy of this novel!